I went to college where we had a lot of Scandinavian exchange students (Norway, Denmark and Sweden). Most of them pretty smart well educated kids. They almost all told me, especially the Norwegians, that their government had serious problems dealing with gangs whose members comprised of kids if Pakistani origin. But they also admitted, and also in light of recent Danish cartoons controversy, that they were all worried immigration from other countries, especially non white ones. So media and politicians tended to hype the crimes committed by Pakistanis and Arabs so that they could propose ways to get rid of them. That said, its probably not that far a claim that most of the Pakistani kids, their parents were not highly educated when they immigrated to Scandinavia, so they dont have time to properly tend to the kids and the kids tended to turn to religion when they cant find ways to integrate.

Germany is by no mean a perfect example, but even they have a large Arab

/Turkish popn, but you dont hear the kind of hysteria that you are now maybe

hearing in Scandinavia.

To LW, maybe your fear has more to do with prejudice than fear of rape.

In college, the first thing any harassment prevention counselor will tell

you that rape is committed by people you know. I am guessing you probably

dont have any Muslim friends or acquaintainces, so chances are that, God

forbid, if a chance of harassment occurs then it will be by some one

you already are friends with and you trust them. So you wanna protect yourself? g

et rid of your prejudice first. and yes, get advice of of agencies that give

good advice of protecting you.

Yes, it is an issue for concern, especially in Sweden, and especially in some specific parts of the country. Why the leftists, why feminists do not care, Cary asks. Because this bigotry of hiding facts is exactly in their agenda. If you delve into peculiarities of Swedish immigration laws, you would be convinced so too (they are different from laws in other Nordic countries, which in fact helped forming the out of control city Malmoe). Statistics is there, but you have to go to the library, and you have to know how to read it, and it is boring. By the way, the informal NGO that can give most throughout information on this is Faithfreedom.

Yet I see big red flags here. Frankly, this time I doubt that letter writer is a real, genuine person. Students in Scandinavia are not the meek types that silently consider taking themselves out of street life before 11.30 p.m., albeit this is a minor remark. What truly rings is the fact that neither Cary, nor the majority of column’s readers have visited Scandinavia. Hence constructing a question about a personal phobia based on general troubles of Islam in (generalized for the whole of) Scandinavia, and posing it to a L.A. based person whose column is this well read, but not yet in Scandinavia (and we are the emotional crowd that takes on discussing Cary's advice for days if not entire weeks)? One label, aside from what the letter writer signed by (‘Bigot’): Flamer.

While I understand the knee jerk reaction to the charge of Muslim rapist, that hardly changes the facts: from Europe to Australia to the Middle East, incidents of Muslim youth targeting "whores" (i.e., unveiled women) is well documented - in fact, broadsheet recently ran a piece on the grand mufti of Australia opining on the fact that unveiled women bring rape upon themselves. In Paris, there's a group called Neither whores nor submissive (Ni putes ni soumises) in response to the attacks brought by Muslim youth to unvieled women - though this particular group focuses on the ghettos outside of Paris - in Austrailia, the Muslim men convicted of gang rapes targeted Aussie looking (i.e., white) women - and felt that they were entitled to rape these women because they were - you guess it - unveiled. To the liberals who charge racism regarding this issue, maybe if it's your wife, daughter, mother or, if you're one of those suicidal feminists who defend the veil as a cultural marker of freedom, yourself, that might change your tune...

Well, first of all, I'm not the same as Frederic B. I'm a different Freddie!

Although I thnk that the other Freddie was a bit to inflamed in his language, I have to say that I am deeply depressed by Cary's answer. And what other letter writers say is correct-- no matter what provisos and qualifiers he puts in to appear PC, Cary is implicitly supporting an idea that is racist on its face: that this woman should fear Arab men because they pose a greater threat of rape to her. As Cary and the letter writer both admit, they have no basis in any statistics to back them up, only the anecdotal and politically motivated stories of conservative bloggers.

What I'd like to recommend everyone do, is to substitute black men for Arabs. I think if you do, you'll find that this woman is a cultural stereotype, a meme-- someone who satisfies some of our most simple and basic prejudices. Do women have a profound reason to be aware of rape? Of course. But that does not excuse the fundamentally irrational act of expecting someone to be a rapist because of their heritage. That is a part of the reason why we must avoid racism. Not just because of the "PC, multi-culti, softy" morals that some here have suggested but because it causes us to act in ways counter to an intelligent perception of our world.

It's incredibly sad to me that people either have forgotten the real lessons of diversity, or perhaps they have given up on them since that became a dirty word. The important thing, of course, is that no one should be expected to be or act a certain way because of their ethnic or racial group. Suppose the letter writer (or by extension Cary) are right, and Arab men are more likely to commit stranger rape than other (read white) people. Suppose that they are two or three times as likely-- which would be an incredibly rare statistical outlier. Even if that was the case, the vast, vast majority of Arab men would not be racists! Just as the vast, vast majority of Arab men are not terrorist. Forgot for a moment the moral implications of racism. Is it even rational or productive to assume that hundreds of millions of Arabs are rapists when they are not?

Prejudice never seems like a big deal to people other than the ones discriminated against. But every day, in a myriad ways, Arab men find themselves treated differently because of perceptions of their ethnic class. What is a decent Arab man to do? In the eyes of the letter writer and Cary, nothing-- he is a threat forever.